Last Friday, I told you about a Trump voter who watched as ICE agents perp-walked his Peruvian wife after their return flight from a honeymoon in Puerto Rico. Even so, the man didn’t regret his vote. 

Today, I want to tell you about a Trump voter who does.

CNN aired a story last night about a “self-described a maga junkie” who lost her job at the Treasury Department’s Bureau of Fiscal Service to cuts by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. 

Reporter Randi Kaye said Jennifer Piggott of Parkersburg, West Virginia, “thought her government job would be safe. She was wrong.” Along with 125 others, she was listed as probationary and fired last month due to “poor performance.” Piggott said she received her last review on January 31 and got “the highest rating you can get.”

She regrets her vote.

“I expected better from [Donald Trump], I really did,” Jennifer Piggott said. “I expected that you would do what was right and cut waste and fraud and all of those things that you promised us before we elected you in office, but you’re not doing that. You’re creating a disaster, and I don’t know what America is going to look like if this continues.”

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From the viewpoint of liberals and Democrats, Jennifer Piggott might seem like the kind of voter who could be persuadable with the right balance of reasonableness and policy. After all, she regrets voting for a president who “cut the knees out of working class Americans,” she said.

But like Bradley Bartell, the man from Wisconsin, she probably isn’t.

As you’ll recall, Bartell wasn’t bothered by the fact that his wife got caught up in an anti-immigrant dragnet so much as the fact that she was not made the exception to the rule, a rule that Bartell seemed to otherwise want applied to people he believed deserved to get caught. 

When he realized that the president he voted for was not going to make an exception for him – though he himself is the exception to every rule – Bartell was stunned. “It doesn’t make any sense,” he said.

Jennifer Piggott said the same thing. 

She “expected better” of him, by which she meant that she had the expectation that she would be made the exception to efforts to “cut waste and fraud and all of those things” in the federal government. 

When she realized that Trump would not make her, a white woman, the exception to the rule of “waste and fraud and all of those things” – when she realized that he was going to treat her as if she were just like everyone else, and not special and deserving and chosen – she also realized that Trump had broken his promise to make American great again. And when all that snapped into place, Piggott was stunned. 

“It doesn’t make sense to me,” she said.

You might think, well, she expected to be made the exception on account of earning “the highest rating you can get” in her last job performance review. But that overlooks the real meaning of “waste, fraud and abuse” in rightwing politics. It doesn’t mean reforming government, and she knows it. It means restoring government, by which I mean restoring it to the exclusive control of rightwing politics.

Liberals and Democrats have been taught for decades to believe that “conservatives” and so on are against government, and there seemed to be a patina of truth in that claim when the subject was gun control, and the regulation of firearms was said to be “government tyranny.” 

You will notice how quiet the National Rifle Association is. 

That’s because “conservatives” and so on never hated government. What they hated was government that was not in their exclusive control, especially government that tried treating everyone equally in policy and law. And what they hated the most was government that recognized past crimes and injustices, and tried to make amends, say, with programs advancing the cause of diversity, equity and inclusion. 

Liberals and Democrats might say FAFO on seeing a Trump voter cry about losing her government job when she voted for American history’s most anti-government candidate. But as I said, that’s false. 

She expected her job to be safe, and she was right to expect it to be, because the promise of maga is the restoration of the government to its original state, which is to say, its original state of apartheid, with a very clear up-down, legally enforced racial hierarchy. She expected the government to cut out people who do not belong, that is, cut out “waste, fraud and abuse,” and now that she has discovered that she is among the “undeserving,” she is experiencing cognitive dissonance. 

As she said: “It doesn’t make sense to me.”

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To those who say, well, the Democrats might still appeal to her despite all that. To that, I say, maybe, but she voted for Trump three times. This is not a woman who is going to be open to Democrats, no matter how much they may teach themselves to talk like Republicans. What Democrats can do is this: accept that there are only two choices for this kind of voter – vote for a Republican or don’t vote – then do everything possible to encourage her to give up hope and not vote.

How? There are probably a million ways. Whatever they are, they should be rooted in the idea that the Trump regime is repressing everybody – the whole of American society – not just marginal people whom rightwingers already believe deserve repression. That shouldn’t be hard for someone like Jennifer Piggott to accept. She already thinks losing her job is “cutting the knees out of working class Americans.”

But to get them to lose hope, they must be encouraged to believe that Trump broke his promise to them. It’s here that liberals and Democrats will make a predictable mistake. They will focus on material things, like jobs or inflation or eggs or some bullshit. That kind of thinking comes from hoping these voters might one day vote for a Democrat. That’s never going to happen, because material things were never the point.

The point is being like Trump, which is to say, being the exception to all rules that otherwise apply to everyone else, thus being special and deserving and chosen. That’s the promise of maga. When Trump treats Republicans like everyone else, however, he’s breaking that promise. 

Does Jennifer Piggott regret voting for Trump? Indeed. But what she really regrets is losing something Democrats shouldn’t give her.